


Favorite Ships for Joshua Christopher

by MetaCat (OtherCat)



Category: Chrno Crusade
Genre: Meta, Multi, Quadrants (Homestuck), Shipping, Troll Romance (Homestuck)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22336909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OtherCat/pseuds/MetaCat
Summary: So a friend on Tumblr reblogged (re-re blogged I think) an old Chrono Crusade post about shipping Joshua Christopher. It can be foundhere.This meta-article is an expansion.
Relationships: Aion/Joshua Christopher, Fiore/Joshua Christopher, Joshua Christopher/Azmaria Hendric, Joshua Christopher/Chrono, Joshua Christopher/Shader
Comments: 3
Kudos: 2





	Favorite Ships for Joshua Christopher

**brightblueinky asked: Last night's rambles has me on a Joshua kick, so Joshua!**

**For Joshua my two main ships are:**

**Joshua/Azmaria:** This pairing took me a while to warm up to because I was most familiar with the anime versions of Azmaria and Joshua. Joshua in the anime is not really capable of having an intimate relationship, mostly because at the point we see him he is still very much a space case. (As in, he does not seem to be entirely lucid, and he is not being helped by his caretakers.) Also, there is probably way too much trauma on Azmaria’s part concerning him. She goes through a traumatic and obviously painful ritual and sees Joshua happily shooting Chrono and then fight with him. (Ending in Joshua stabbing him.) There is no possibility for a relationship between them, in my opinion, even if Joshua were able to get the help he needed. I could see them becoming friends, but only if Azmaria could get past her own trauma.

Manga! Joshua and Azmaria gives us plenty of room to see the potential of a relationship, even if Manga!Joshua is creepy as hell at certain moments. They do seem to share a connection since Azmaria dreamed about him before she met him. (I kind of have a headcanon where that was not the first dream she’s had about him. This is due to the fact that I love dreamwalking. I also have a semi-headcanon that the kids who have the “Apostle Factor” are all networked together via the Astral Line.) I can easily see them drawing closer together, possibly under the inept matchmaking efforts of Rosette. It would be a slightly awkward romantic comedy complicated by Joshua having been raised by demons, and Azmaria being from Portugal and therefore equally “alien” in some ways to Joshua.

**Joshua/Aion** : is my second ship, though it is slightly skeevy given the age difference. (Technically this pairing is also skeevy because of the mentor/student relationship.) Oddly enough, it was that anime that made me think Joshua had a crush of some kind on Aion. The shippiest moments for me are when Aion is fussily buttoning up Joshua’s shirt, and then secondly during the first confrontation between Rosette and Joshua is San Francisco, when Joshua instantly steps between Aion and Rosette with a completely feral look on his face. I absolutely did not want to ship this because I hated anime!Aion with great fervency. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking of it. ~~Damn you Moriyama.~~

Manga!Aion made me ship the pairing even more since Aion has a fussy “older brother/concerned mentor” attitude toward Joshua that is weirdly sweet. He so obviously cares about Joshua, though in a slightly horrifying Aion-type way. My preferred set up is some AU where Joshua is an adult and discovers that Aion is somehow alive. My feelings for the pairing are somewhat complicated as I tend to see manga!Aion as asexual or gray-ace. And by complicated I mean I want confused “lover’s spats” with Joshua being somewhat confused and frustrated because of only being able to get to first base.

**My minor ships are:**

**Joshua/Fiore:** Yes, I know she seems to let him down gently before going off to confront her sister. I KNOW. Also there is a significant age difference. And also, being a caretaker for someone out of their cotton-picking mind is stressful, even if you are some kind of magic android-person who used to be human. But I love loyalty-based pairings, and also caretaking pairings, so we have me, shipping a boy and his nurse. It’s clear that when he isn’t out of his mind and thinking Fi is his sister, he cares for her a great deal, and it seems pretty clear that the reverse is true as well. They have a definite connection, in that Joshua was instantly aware of the moment Satella took Fi (and herself) off the playing field. In the epilogue, there’s also obviously a strong desire on his part to find her.

I would love to see a fic where Joshua and Fiore are reunited somehow. I’m not sure how it would work in an anime setting, but in the manga, the sisters don’t die so much as have a “Captain America” happen to them, only with a gem, instead of ice, so logically, if they were found sooner, Joshua might be able to have a relationship with Fi. One bunny I had involved the Magdalen Order finding the “remains” of Fiore, (who is not actually dead, just inoperative at the moment) and in getting the collar and wrist cuffs off, accidentally starve her into a feral state because she can’t “eat” without them. Cue someone getting word to Joshua, who has to come to the rescue.

**Joshua/Shader:** Okay so, in Perfect Mind and sequels, I have Joshua and Shader in a very close, mutual caretaking sort of relationship. I set it up that way because that seemed to be what the term “limiter” seemed to be indicating. Someone who could balance out Joshua’s crazy and take care of him. (This being what Fiore had been doing up until things started going wrong enough that Aion decided to see if Rosette could be Joshua’s “limiter.”) This is how I ended up shipping them. They are the nerdy kids pairing, though Shader is technically the adult. (She is not the adult. She is too easily distracted to be the adult. I don’t care if she’s older.)

In the terminology of a completely different fandom/species, they are moirails. Moirallegiance is that super special feeling of wanting to make someone eat an actual food instead of ten gallons of coffee. It is that feeling of wanting to help someone fix their shit. It involves talking about your feelings and/or cuddling...and also occasionally sitting on someone until they calm the fuck down. In the Perfect Mind series, Joshua ends up doing a lot of the emotional caretaking because Shader is frankly a mess. Shader meanwhile takes care of most of the physical stuff because Joshua pushes himself because he is also frankly, a mess.

The best part is: I decided on this kind of relationship for Joshua/Shader in Perfect Mind a long time before I would read Homestuck. Once I did read it, I went, “oh my god, they’re moirails! Of course.” (Technically also meowrails since Shader is cat-themed!)”

I _can_ see the possibility for a more sexual relationship between Joshua and Shader, but I think it would be more of a casual friends-with-benefits thing with them both.

**Joshua/Chrono:** I can definitely see a relationship between these two! It would mostly involve Joshua yelling at Chrono and Chrono accepting all of the blame. I think they would be able to get closer, eventually, probably via talking about Rosette. I have no clear settings for this, but I would assume that it would be in one where Chrono is alive/survived blowing up Pandemonium, but Rose somehow did not, as in, dying much sooner than in canon. (This would result in so much damned angst.) ~~Or in a setting where Chrono is the filling in a Christopher sandwich.~~

Going back to Homestuck quadrants, (all of the ships, 4x the romance!) there would be some red/black vacillation. (Red-pity-matesprit, romance based in empathy/sympathy for the other person Black-hate-kismesis, romance based in rivalry and antipathy for the other person.) They would not make good kismesis, because I’m not sure that Chrono would fight back, and the point of kismesis is pointing out the other’s flaws and also beating them/challenging them. They’d need an auspistice pretty quickly. (Auspistice is a third party coming in to mediate a bad kismeses. This is also a romance because the auspistice wouldn’t be effective if the one auspistizing didn’t care--for values of “care”-- about the other two, and the reverse.)

~~Now I want to do the “species that does not have quadrants has quadrants” fic. Dammit.~~

So these are in general my favorite Joshua Christopher pairings. ~~Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.~~ Comments and questions and conversation are welcome in the comments. ~~  
~~


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